How do we figure out intelligent life out there?

Stephen Wolfram responds to this question (ht): How do we figure out whether there’s intelligent life in the universe that doesn’t share our terrestrial history?

[In] the past we assumed that complicated signals from the cosmos must have been produced by civilizations that were about as advanced as we are. What the principle of computational equivalence tells us is that this isn’t true. You can get complicated sequences and patterns from simple rules that don’t require billions of years of evolution. A famous example is when Marconi and Tesla detected weird radio emissions from space and said, “the Martians must be signaling us!” The radio had just been invented, so they assumed that we had reached a technological threshold and were suddenly able to communicate with extraterrestrial life forms. It turns out that the signals came from the magneto-hydrodynamics of the outer atmosphere. When pulsars were discovered much later, scientists were also really excited because the signal was so periodic and seemed too intentional. In both cases, there was a confusion about the underlying cause. For me, the realization that we cannot really talk about abstract intelligence had an important personal consequence: I realized that artificial intelligence doesn’t require us to build a brain-like thing that we can later program, but that we can start with simple computation.

Now, if only I can detect intelligent life on college campuses.  Oh, wait, Wolfram has a comment on that, too:

I was an academic for a while, but I really like energetically doing projects. What I tried to do is build a very efficient mechanism to turn ideas into things. Right now, entrepreneurial companies seem to be the best way to do that. I look at my friends in academia and think: “Wow, things moved so slowly there in the last 25 years!” When we hire academics to work on WolframAlpha or Mathematica, the biggest shock for them is always how quick everything moves. We sit down, and an hour later we have decided what we are going to do and moved on. We can do crazy projects! If you want an immediate impact on the world, that’s what you need.

Granted that his life as an academic was quite a few leagues above my pay-grade.   But, whatever the level, things move too damn slowly in academia!  That, surely, is not a sign of intelligent life :)